WHILE SLAINE RECENTLY KISSED his last axe in 2000 AD, Rebellion has a new fantasy hero in Black Beth, who now stars in her own one-shot after appearing in the Scream! & Misty Special. However, the Blas Gallego-drawn sword-maiden actually pre-dates the Celtic warrior by over a decade, having originally been developed for an unpublished comic – also called Scream – in the early 1970s, before being resurrected in the 1988 Scream! Holiday Special.
“I was a die-hard Scream! reader and had no idea what a sword-opera strip was doing in a horror book, but it totally won me over all the same,” recalls writer Alec Worley. “I got a bit obsessed with it and wanted to read more. Alas, I never knew the strip was a cancelled IPC project and had sat in a drawer for over 10 years. The whole Macbeth-meets-Red Sonja atmosphere had me completely absorbed, and I begged Treasury of British Comics editor Keith Richardson to allow me and [artist] DaNi to bring her back.